How do you name your World? (Or nations, etc., for that matter...)

[jwbjerk]

My current WIP is a sci-fi planet. It is inhabited by some humans, but humans are by no means the dominant species. There are several other sapient species, several who have languages humans can't begin to pronounce, and some whose languages aren't even based on sound. So i'm going with transliteration whenever possible. Names like "Tha'*p~*p'iikz#llrn" while they look exotic IMHO get old pretty fast.

The planet is generally referred to as "this orb". The phrase is similar to the english use of "the world", except since all the sapient inhabitants are from elsewhere, they know that it is not the world, it's this world, the one they happen to be on. An "orb" is simply a round thing, but sounds better than transliterating it as "this round thing."

Provisionally i've named the continents with the phonetic alphabet from west to east: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, etc. Though i probably won't keep those names, but give places geographic or historical names. I like making up cool sounding names too, but i'm not interested in making up several alien languages many of which don't use our phonemes.

[njordys]

I am lucky enough to be Norwegian, so I can just steal the name from local areas and it will still sound Tolkienish. :p

There are a lot of different sources I can draw inspiration from, but there is fine line to balance between boring and outlandish. If I take a name from a local area or a Germanic language, I usually try to spiff it up a little, like rearrange the spelling and such to see if I can make something interesting out of it. If I on the other hand take a name from a distant culture, like Native American or Chinese, then I try to tone it down, westernize it so to say, in order to make it sound more like something in line with my own established view of fantasy names.
But it is all very subjective, what I find boring or weird might be brilliant for other's.

When I made the world of Thule, I took the name from the distant frozen land of the north described by Pytheas in around 250 BC (i can't recall correctly the year). The islands of Vega are named from the Norwegian island of Vega. The -thuk names are inspired from the extinct Native American tribe of Beothuk, previously found on Newfoundland and believed to have been in contact with Norse explorers.